Cloud Computing
Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud approaches as well as services such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are being embraced for cost efficiency, scalability, and consolidation. Hypervisor technologies, Open Source versus Proprietary Hypervisor technologies, Security, Open Standards, Interoperability, High Availability, and Backup & Recovery are among the issues that are critical to consider when evaluating a move to the cloud.
Cloud Computing Articles
Both open source software ( OSS) and cloud computing continue to experience strong interest and growth despite the economic downturn. Clearly, both provide the promise of reduced operating and software licensing costs. For instance, corporations looking to reduce the cost incurred by Microsoft Office licensing are looking more closely at the open source OpenOffice alternative, or at Google's online application suite, Google Apps. There's understandable resistance to moving from the rich experience offered by Microsoft to these lower-cost alternatives, but resistance has a way of disappearing in the face of financial imperatives.
Posted May 15, 2009
Hubspan, a leading provider of business integration solutions, and IBM have announced WebSpan, a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) integration platform. WebSpan combines the Hubspan on-demand integration platform and IBM WebSphere integration software into a single platform that can help businesses reduce the cost, time and complexity associated with traditional integration and business process automation solutions.
Posted May 12, 2009
As part of the announcement of its recent WebSphere Cloudburst appliance, IBM announced a toolset that helps automate the deployment and configuration of applications for the cloud. IBM Rational Automation Framework for WebSphere is designed to optimize configuration and application deployment to customize WebSphere CloudBurst patterns.
Posted May 11, 2009
Pentaho Corporation, a provider of commercial open source business intelligence and data integration software, has announced Pentaho Data Integration 3.2, a new release of Pentaho's extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool with enhancements for cloud- and cluster-based ETL, as well as new product features such as additional transformation capabilities and connections to new data sources. Pentaho Data Integration is already in production on the Amazon cloud supporting cloud-based data warehouses, and now with
Posted May 05, 2009
IBM is holding its annual IMPACT SOA event this week, and despite rumors of the "death" of SOA, it's clear IBM sees SOA as an important strategy across its product line.
Posted May 04, 2009
IBM announced two new products that allow customers to extend their investment in service-oriented architecture (SOA) into a cloud services environment. These new offerings enable clients to easily create application environments that can be deployed and managed in a "private cloud."
Posted May 04, 2009
IBM has announced version 9.7 of DB2 and InfoSphere Warehouse software, focused on transactional performance improvements in the DB2 database, and on expansion of analytics to XML data in the InfoSphere Data Warehouse. Both new products also reduce an even greater amount of space needed to store data, helping clients to gain significant savings on related costs including energy. This offering is also the industry's first database software that will deliver business analytics capabilities for both relational and XML data at the same time, according to IBM.
Posted April 28, 2009
rPath announced an updated solution for automating the packaging and management of applications that are ready to run in traditional, virtual or cloud-based environments.
Posted April 27, 2009
Schooner Information Technology, Inc., a provider of data access appliances for information-intensive Web 2.0 and cloud computing data centers, says it emerged from "stealth mode" last week to move into the market with data access appliances in collaboration with IBM.
Posted April 20, 2009
The idea of "SQL Server in the cloud" is all the rage as I write this article. Many SQL Server experts already predict the demise of the IT data center and a complete upending of the current state of our industry, in which large enterprises can spend millions of dollars on SQL Server licenses, hardware and staff. I have to admit, when I first heard about this idea, I was ecstatic. What could be better for an enterprise than to have all the goodness of a SQL Server database with none of the hardware or staffing issues? However, on deeper examination, there is much about which to be cautious.
Posted April 15, 2009
Pentaho Corporation, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), has announced Pentaho BI Suite Version 3, aimed at making it cost effective for businesses to deploy easy-to-use, robust BI capabilities to users throughout the organization. Pentaho BI Suite Version 3 allows business users to easily create interactive dashboards-including Adobe Flash-based visualizations-without training. Also, based on existing customer successes and growing customer demand, Pentaho is introducing a Cloud Computing Edition, packaged for deployment on the Amazon EC2 Cloud, providing companies with another way to drive down the cost of bringing BI into their organizations.
Posted March 31, 2009
Vertica Systems has announced a new version of its Vertica Analytic Database packaged as a virtualized appliance to run in VMware environments. The new Vertica Virtualized Analytic Database is a simple-to-deploy, self-contained software package that runs its own Linux operating system and copy of Vertica, on any VMware-supported hardware as if it were a physical computer.
Posted February 24, 2009
IBM revealed a series of new products, services, clients and partnerships for the next phase of its "Blue Cloud" initiative. The cross-company portfolio of cloud computing offerings for business includes server capacity on demand, online data protection, and Lotus e-mail and collaboration software.
Posted February 23, 2009
few years ago, it seemed as though the days of the "micro-ISV"-very small Independent software vendors consisting of one or two developers-were over. The role once played by shareware windows applications had been supplanted by free web applications financed by advertising revenue. The start-up costs for such web applications-including funding a scalable and reliable web hosting infrastructure-were beyond the reach of most small software entrepreneurs.
Posted February 15, 2009
In the classic comedy, "The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy," a frustrated Ford Prefect can't understand why a bunch of marketing consultants shipwrecked on prehistoric earth can't invent the wheel.
Posted January 15, 2009
The old maxim, "may you live in interesting times" certainly holds true for data managers and professionals these days. The year 2008 was full of changes and challenges, and 2009 promises even more. To look ahead on the challenges emerging, we canvassed industry leaders across the IT landscape to get their views on what to expect in the year ahead.
Posted January 05, 2009
The old maxim, "may you live in interesting times" certainly holds true for IT managers and professionals these days. The year 2008 was full of changes and challenges, and 2009 promises even more.
Posted December 15, 2008